February 2012
1 post
January 2012
7 posts
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Whedeontastic
Last night, Danielle and I watched Angel season 5 episode 22, Not Fade Away — the show’s finale. And thus we concluded our seven (I think) month mission to watch the entirety of Buffy and Angel from the beginning.
It holds up really, really well, if you were wondering.
This means in 2011, with a little bit of overspill, we got through all of The Wire, The Sopranos, Buffy, Angel,...
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Windows Phone 7 "spiffs" →
bananacasts:
Word has it the Kinect is going to be expanded as a Windows interface. If Microsoft are smart, they will expand the Xbox and Kinect brands into the rest of their business. They should explode Xbox Live into a service across Windows PCs, Xbox, and their phones.
Noteworthy that Xbox Live has already come to Windows as Games for Windows Live, which is pretty much feature complete in...
December 2011
9 posts
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MacBook Air: yes or no?
Cannot decide if I should pick up a MacBook Air while I’m here in the US or not. Here’s my wondering aloud. Feel free to offer advice.
What I have now: an ageing MacBook Pro (mid ‘08); which is mostly tethered to a 26” Samsung monitor on my desk. One of the two GPUs is busted and the battery is shot. I rarely use it off the desk, although I might if it wasn’t so...
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“I’m really enjoying Downton Abbey, although there are some implausible...”
– Danielle. My American readers might not realise this, but snootily holding the BBC up as being just plain better than other channels is not just an important step on her path to becoming British — but to becoming a British, middle class liberal. I just need to get her reading the Guardian now.
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iOS gaming versus console gaming
tj replied to your post: Xbox 360 first-run game install procedures are getting out of hand This is why my only gaming devices are iOS devices.
Meh. There’s nothing on iOS to compare to Skyrim or Forza 4 or Minecraft, and those are just the...
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Xbox 360 first-run game install procedures are...
I just bought Forza Motorsport 4, an eagerly-awaited title from a Microsoft-owned dev team (i.e. we can assume that this game follows Microsoft’s best practices). Here’s what I had to do to get the game running. These steps are optional, but will result in a degraded experience if you don’t do them.
Find the special “I bought this game new, not pre-owned, so give me free...
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November 2011
5 posts
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“7:00 a.m. I wake up, and just as I have done every morning since puberty, I...”
– Domenick Scudera details a gay day in his gay lifestyle. Click through for the rest of this awesome essay. (via @lexfri and @dmoren.)
Adventures in recruiter cold-emailing
Recruiter: Apologies if this is slightly off the mark, but I am currently looking for a Front Arena Developer (see spec below) for my client in London.
Me: I'm 140 miles outside London and I've never even heard of Front Arena, let alone know how to use it. So yes. You're "slightly off the mark".
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This is Not a Cheesesteak: Welsh Cheesesteak? →
Michaelangelo from the awesome blog This Is Not A Cheesesteak did a long post writing up of an email exchange we had where we discussed how authentic (or not) I could make a Philly Cheesesteak here in the UK. And then he said some very complementary things about my food blog, which was damned decent of him. Check it out!
October 2011
11 posts
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“We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and...”
– From the Guardian’s Corrections and Clarifications column in 2007 (via the BBC’s Magazine Monitor.)
Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It →
Generation X is sick of your bullshit.
Go read the whole thing.
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“It’s just before midnight on a Monday, and Houston has turned his favorite...”
– From Forbes’s profile on Dropbox creator Drew Houston.
This whole without-irony brogramming thing leaves me utterly cold, I have to admit. I’m pretty sure I’d be miserable working there.
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WatchWe seem to have some incredibly fast-moving clouds here tonight.
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Steve Jobs
Say what you like about his divisive nature but he was certainly a smart bloke and we need all the smart blokes we can find in this world. People are saying that when we look back in decades to come his name will rank with industrialists and visionaries like Edison and Ford and Disney. Time will tell on that, but I think they’re probably right.
Lots of fascinating and touching remembrances...
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September 2011
12 posts
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“But with Mike’s departure, the gonzo spirit that first drew me to TechCrunch —...”
– Paul Carr is a self-important tosser. Contrast this quote with this post by Fleet Street Fox which succinctly points out that journalists, real journalists, never allow themselves to become the story. There’s honour in the latter approach. I see no honour in the former.
The wave of public...
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in the fade: Some real shock and awe.. →
frageelay:
I didn’t watch the debates last night, but the further askew the far right pulls us, and the more mute—or should I say ‘dumb’—the left remains, the less I recognize the country I love.
I’m not convinced that the left remaining mute is the problem. When the left do speak up, at least from what I can see over here in the Old World, they counter the rhetoric of the far right, the...
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Mobile data in the UK
Three’s rates are ridiculously cheap. We have friends of Danielle’s from America staying next week so I had a quick look to see how much it would cost to get them some basic cell service for their visit. They have HTC smartphones of some type, although I don’t yet know if they are carrier-locked. Hopefully not, so I can just swap their SIM card over to a UK one when they...
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We spent the entire weekend in the kitchen
Yesterday, I made a bacon and mushroom frittata for breakfast and paprika chicken with pasta for dinner. Today was bacon sandwiches on fresh-baked bread for breakfast and roast chicken with mashed potato and gravy for dinner.
In that time, I’ve also put 2.5 kg of beef brisket into brine to make salt beef; made 1.25 litres of bourbon BBQ sauce; and made 6 portions of tomato-butter...
Brick (2005)
Brick is really, really good. It’s a gritty noir thriller about a classic gumshoe-type investigating his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance, except all the cast are high schoolers (so instead of ratting people out to the police, they go to the principal). Despite that seemingly ludicrous setup, it’s played straight. Sounds weird, really works. Has some great quotes too (e.g....
August 2011
17 posts
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On ExpressCard/34
People complained when Apple dropped ExpressCard slots from the MacBook Pro line in 2009 in favour of an SD card reader slot instead. Meanwhile, my MBP’s ExpressCard slot has remained empty since I bought it. The only thing I’ve ever come close to buying to go in it is… an SD card reader.
Well played, Apple.
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